Research Interests and Publications

Most of us intuitively know that individuals differ from one another in more ways than we can count. In fact, we make important life decisions based on our awareness of these differences -- we choose paths for ourselves that (hopefully) match our unique characteristics and we interact with other individuals in ways that are influenced by our perceptions of their unique characteristics. While personality science has made encouraging progress towards the description and classification of these individual differences, many questions remain unanswered. My lab is particularly focused on questions related to the structure and measurement of psychological individual differences (e.g., temperament/personality, cognitive abilities, interests, values, motivation). This work includes the development of measurement tools for use in clinical settings and the translation of findings from individual differences research towards the prediction of real-world outcomes. Most of this work follows from analyses of large-scale data sets like those collected from the SAPA-Project, where more data on more than 7,000 variables are contributed by more than 250,000 participants each year. Datasets like these are well-suited for the development of both empirically-informed outcome-specific prediction tools and taxonomic models that can more broadly inform the ways that individual differences relate to one another across the life span. My lab advocates strongly for practices that promote transparency in science (e.g., the publication and management of open data, extensive documentation of reproducible research methods, and the reporting of findings in freely accessible outlets like PsyArXiv), and we ask our collaborators to support us in this endeavor whenever feasible.